Just be careful about how you are updating your tables as you could generate a large number of emails.
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pjpAug 24 '09 at 17:14

3

pjp is right, this sets off all sorts of bad idea alarms
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stimmsAug 24 '09 at 17:31

2

+1: readers here should note the importance of using the "dbmail" procedures (new in SQL Server 2005) and not the SQL Mail procedures. Among many other improvements the DBMail procedures send asynchronously, so they are safe to use from triggers. (you should never use synchronous communications from triggers, very bad juju).
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RBarryYoungAug 24 '09 at 17:38

By "safe" from triggers, I mean that t will never lock-up the user's trying to access the table. Email "flooding" is another thing altogether.
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RBarryYoungAug 24 '09 at 17:40

Using a trigger is a given. Either solution, DBMail or a polling process, will work. If you go with a polling process, go ahead and make the polling interval something you can change while the polling process is running, if possible. The problem you are going to run into is if you want to test or debug it, you won't want to wait the full polling interval. If the interval is 5 minutes, you either have to restart the poller or have a separate polling interval just for checking if the polling interval changed (can we say recursive?). So write the poller with debugging/testing in mind.

That might be enough to convince you to use the DBMail solution. I've never used it so others will have to speak to that.